The CAB forum members have voted and are in favor of making the CAA Checking Mandatory. All CAs (Certificate Authorities) will need to comply with the CAA (Certificate Authority Authorization) verification by September 2017.
The details are described in RFC 6844 – Abstract:
The Certification Authority Authorization (CAA) DNS Resource Record
allows a DNS domain name holder to specify one or more Certification
Authorities (CAs) authorized to issue certificates for that domain.
CAA Resource Records allow a public Certification Authority to
implement additional controls to reduce the risk of unintended
certificate mis-issue. This document defines the syntax of the CAA
record and rules for processing CAA records by certificate issuers.
This announcement made me curious about to what degree top HTTPS sites have opt’d into this by including CAA resource records for their properties…
I put together a simple scanner that queries the DNS records for each of the HTTPS ready Alexa Top 1 million sites. [Update] Code is now available on github
I did an initial scan totaling ~670k DNS records, resulting in ~0.05% having CAA resource records.
Given the low percentage of adoption, I am curious to observe how this changes over time. To that end, I’ve setup the scan to run periodically and post the results to @CAA_bot on twitter. Follow the account if you’re interested in being updated on progress.
Darran Boyd 